{"id":2892,"date":"2004-10-29T11:42:03","date_gmt":"2004-10-29T16:42:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/2892.html"},"modified":"2004-10-29T11:42:03","modified_gmt":"2004-10-29T16:42:03","slug":"quite-a-week","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/quite-a-week\/","title":{"rendered":"Quite a week"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Ridiculous though it may be, there are millions of voters who don&#8217;t make up their minds about which presidential candidate to back until the very last week of the campaign. Why they can&#8217;t choose in advance is truly beyond me, but this nevertheless happens every election season.<\/p>\n<p>But in 2004, this should be yet another indication of a pending Kerry victory. If this week drives the outcome, it&#8217;ll be a landslide. After all, if a voter was waiting until now to start getting engaged, think about what that voter has seen in just the last six days&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>* The Bush administration <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2004\/10\/25\/international\/middleeast\/25bomb.html\">ignored warnings<\/a> and allowed tons of deadly explosives to be looted from Al Qaqaa.<\/p>\n<p>* His campaign&#8217;s top surrogate then went on national television to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/002876.html\">blame the troops<\/a> for the mistake.<\/p>\n<p>* No-bid contracts for Halliburton are now the subject of a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.msnbc.msn.com\/id\/6356265\/\">criminal investigation<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>* Speaking of Cheney, he confused everyone this week by calling the debacle in Iraq a &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/wp-dyn\/articles\/A64157-2004Oct26.html\">remarkable success story<\/a>.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>* The <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2004\/10\/29\/international\/europe\/29casualties.html\">100,000 dead Iraqi civilians<\/a> probably would disagree.<\/p>\n<p>* Bush went wildly off-message by saying Americans&#8217; safety from terrorism is &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.reuters.com\/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&#038;storyID=6590369\">up in the air<\/a>.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>* Bush&#8217;s man in Iraq, Ayad Allawi, accused foreign troops (read: Americans) of &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/wp-dyn\/articles\/A63772-2004Oct26.html\">gross negligence<\/a>&#8221; in the massacre of 49 Iraqi National Guard recruits over the weekend.<\/p>\n<p>* Bush&#8217;s exciting final TV ad is exposed by a blogger of having <a href=\"http:\/\/www.dailykos.com\/story\/2004\/10\/27\/22442\/878\">been doctored<\/a> to show pictures of troops who weren&#8217;t really there.<\/p>\n<p>* The administration was embarrassed by new secret documents that noted Bush&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2004\/10\/26\/politics\/26detain.html\">further abandonment of the Geneva Conventions<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>* Costs for the war in Iraq are about to escalate by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/wp-dyn\/articles\/A62554-2004Oct25.html\">at least an additional $70 billion<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>* Reversing a historical trend, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.editorandpublisher.com\/eandp\/news\/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000684275\">most of the nation&#8217;s newspapers<\/a> want Bush out of office.<\/p>\n<p>And today&#8217;s not over yet.<br \/>\n<!--more--><br \/>\nAs <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2004\/10\/29\/opinion\/29krugman.html\">Paul Krugam noted<\/a> today, this is the opposite of what BC04 had planned.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>But worst of all from the right&#8217;s point of view, Al Qaqaa has disrupted the campaign&#8217;s media strategy. Karl Rove clearly planned to turn the final days of the campaign into a series of &#8220;global test&#8221; moments &#8211; taking something Mr. Kerry said and distorting its meaning, then generating pseudo-controversies that dominate the airwaves. Instead, the news media have spent the last few days discussing substance. And that&#8217;s very bad news for Mr. Bush.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Let&#8217;s hope so; I don&#8217;t know what more it would take to convince voters.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ridiculous though it may be, there are millions of voters who don&#8217;t make up their minds about which presidential candidate to back until the very last week of the campaign. Why they can&#8217;t choose in advance is truly beyond me, but this nevertheless happens every election season. But in 2004, this should be yet another [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2892","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2892","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2892"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2892\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2892"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2892"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2892"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}